A 'Garfield Minus Garfield' comic in which Jon Arbuckle generally laments the meaning of life
Ballantine Books

Garfield Minus Garfield: Without Garfield's retorts about how glad he is the day is over, things look a little more bleak.

by Laurel Maury

Early in 2008, Irishman Dan Walsh started posting online copies online of Garfield — with Garfield removed. The goofy, 30-year-old comic strip featuring the lasagna-loving tabby and Jon Arbuckle, his girlfriend-less owner, has been adored since the early '80s. Without the cat, a dark humor emerged that resonated through the growing world of webcomics. Within a few months, www.garfieldminusgarfield.net was receiving 500,000 hits a day.

Garfield creator Jim Davis became a fan and asked Walsh to work on a book. Now accompanying the rather lavish Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs and Lasagna, by Jim Davis is a small green book, Garfield Minus Garfield.

How the project started, how the fan mail looks, and teaming up with Jim Davis, after the jump...

 
A 'Garfield Minus Garfield' example in which Jon Arbuckle discusses stuffing a frozen chicken down h
Ballantine Books

Jon Arbuckle: In Garfield Minus Garfield, he's a man without a sounding board.

"I put together the site to make two or three friends laugh. I never expected this," says Walsh. "I get fan mail.... People say Jon reminds them of themselves, which is pretty terrifying." Jon is an off-kilter, slightly manic suburban-dweller who lives alone; Walsh reports that his more interesting letters have come from people suffering bi-polar depression. (One of the more disturbing strips, available on the site, but not in the book, shows Jon talking about shooting himself, followed by a blank panel.) With the site, Walsh takes a historically mainstream strip and discovers an underside that's edgy and strange..

The Irish artist and IT worker had been knocking around with the idea for some time after he'd come across it on message boards including Truth and Beauty Bomb. He's adamant that neither the idea nor the humor is original to him. "Garfield minus Garfield doesn't show anything new about Jon. Garfield never answers and never has. It's always been Jon talking to himself." It's funny in a disturbing way to see the lonely man perform his screwball acts to empty air: imagine someone alone in a room, stuffing a frozen chicken down his pants. And the vacant panels once filled by Garfield's sardonic looks are downright eerie. Humor is often defined as pain plus time, but here, it's pain plus (or minus) cat.